Over 50 years ago, researchers circumnavigated the Americas sampling ocean life along the way at regular intervals. In the process, they discovered a striking relationship: the abundance of most marine species is linked to their body size such that their collective mass winds up being the same. Krill are a billion times smaller than tuna, but their numbers are a billion times more abundant. If you were to weigh all the krill in the ocean, the mass should be close to all the tuna -- but not anymore.

A new study found that human activity like industrial fishing has broken this mathematical relationship known as the Sheldon spectrum, after Ray Sheldon, a marine ecologist who first reported this relationship in 1969.

Humans are at it again

The Sheldon spectrum -- the total mass of a marine population stays the same even as the individual size changes -- applies to virtually all ocean life, from the tiniest bacteria to the largest whales. Even though a whale is trillions of trillions of times larger than a bacterium, its population size is smaller by the same order of magnitude, so their mass evens out.

“It kind of suggests that no size is better than any other size,” Eric Galbraith, a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University in Montreal, told Wired. “Everybody has the same size cells. And basically, for a cell, it doesn’t really matter what body size you’re in, you just kind of tend to do the same thing.”

But Galbraith was shocked to find that the Sheldon spectrum has been broken, specifically for larger marine creatures. Generally, the larger the fish or crustacean, the easier it is to catch. Global fisheries are notoriously unsustainable, with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) pointing out that one-third of fish stock worldwide is experiencing depletion due to “overfishing and habitat destruction.”

Galbraith and colleagues, led by Max Planck Institute ecologist Ian Hatton, used modern satellite imagery and recent in situ ocean measurements to estimate the abundance of plankton and fish. They also used a reliable estimate of marine mammal populations from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the organization that designates threatened or endangered species.

"One of the biggest challenges to comparing organisms spanning bacteria to whales is the enormous differences in scale," says Hatton.

"The ratio of their masses is equivalent to that between a human being and the entire Earth. We estimated organisms at the small end of the scale from more than 200,000 water samples collected globally, but larger marine life required completely different methods."

These estimates were compared to those from 1850, which they modeled using records of fish and marine mammals that industrialized fishing and whaling had captured.

The Sheldon power law has been broken in the last century by human activity. Credit: Ian Hatton.

In these pre-1850 levels, the Sheldon spectrum held across the board, with biomass staying remarkably consistent across size brackets. But when they compared these numbers to modern-day biomass, the relationship broke down in the upper one-third of the spectrum where the largest marine life can be found.

"Humans have impacted the ocean in a more dramatic fashion than merely capturing fish," explained marine ecologist Ryan Heneghan from the Queensland University of Technology.

"It seems that we have broken the size spectrum – one of the largest power law distributions known in nature."

Since 1800, the researchers found that the very largest size bracket of marine life experienced a reduction in biomass of nearly 90%. For instance, all whale species declined from more than 2.5 million to under 800,000 from 1890 to 2001.

In other words, a law of nature that has seemingly been true for eons has now been broken in just 100 years thanks to human activity. And overfishing isn't the only problem we've brought upon ocean life. Climate-induced changes in the ocean are causing additional stress, throwing the ocean into a health crisis, which includes a loss of biodiversity.

More research is needed to understand how this huge loss in biomass affects the oceans, but it can't be anything good. Having healthy fish stock is critical to the overall functioning of ocean ecosystems, as well as certain planetary functions. For instance, the ocean is known to play an indispensable role in regulating carbon in the atmosphere. 

Meanwhile, we already know the solution: reduce overfishing. Fish compose less than 3% of the annual human food consumption, so cutting back on fish shouldn't be that big of a deal. But that's of course easier said than done.

The findings appeared in the journal Science Advances.

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But what happens if we fail to limit warming to 1.5°C (as looks increasingly likely)? And what happens if we do subsequently manage to rectify that "overshoot" and bring temperatures back down? A team of researchers writing in the journal Nature have now published a study exploring these questions.

In a nutshell, their work shows the worst case scenario of ice sheet collapse and consequent sea-level rise can be avoided—and even partly reversed—if we manage to reduce the global temperatures projected for after 2100. Moreover, the lower and sooner those temperatures fall, the more chance there is of minimizing that ice melt and sea-level rise.

We already know that the Greenland ice sheet is losing more than 300 billion cubic meters of ice per year, currently driving global sea levels up by a little less than a millimeter per year. One major worry is that further warming could cross critical thresholds, sometimes referred to as "tipping points". For example, as the air warms more ice will melt, lowering the elevation of the ice surface and hence exposing it to warmer air temperatures and more melting—even without continued atmospheric warming.

Although far more complex and nuanced in reality, it is feedback processes such as this which dictate that global warming be limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in order to avoid catastrophes, such as wholescale ice-sheet collapse.

How to simulate a huge ice sheet in a computer

It is critically important that we are able to predict how the Greenland ice sheet will respond to future warming. To achieve this, researchers generally use computer models of ice motion. In essence, these divide the ice sheet into tens of thousands of 3D segments and apply physical laws of ice motion to compute how each segment changes over thousands of individual time steps, factoring in things like anticipated climatic change, ice thickness, ice slope and the temperature of the ice interior and ice base.

However, these projections are subject to substantial uncertainties. It's tough to know exactly how ice moves over bedrock, or what its internal temperature might be. And the climate is made up of many moving parts. Atmospheric and oceanic circulations may also change radically over the thousands or tens of thousands of years it takes for the ice sheet to settle in to a new equilibrium.

In the face of such challenges, a team of researchers led by Nils Bochow of the Arctic University in Norway have published their new study. They ran two independent state-of-the-art computer programs that were able to simulate how the Greenland ice sheet would respond to various possible levels of global warming, over tens of thousands of years. To mimic the effects of overshooting the critical 1.5°C threshold, they include a gradual warming trajectory to a "peak" temperature, followed by a period during which temperature stabilizes to a generally lower final "convergence temperature".

Good news and bad news

The results are fascinating. If temperatures peak at 2°C or so, and remain there, then the models—as expected—predict substantial ice sheet collapse after several thousands of years.

However, things change if warming is seriously mitigated post-2100. In those models, inertia in the ice sheet's response—a bit like the time it takes for a ripple to settle down as it passes across a pond—means that an overshoot is at least partly reversible as long as temperatures are quickly brought back down.

For example, if temperature stabilizes by the year 2200 at less than 1.5°C of warming, then the ice sheet should remain smaller than at present, but stable. This is the case irrespective of how far (within reason) peak temperatures overshot 1.5°C in the year 2100. In such cases the sea rise would likely be restricted to a meter or so.

However, such a recovery becomes impossible if it takes too long to get temperatures down or if the convergence temperature remains too high. In those scenarios, ice-sheet collapse and substantial sea-level rise become all but inevitable.

Perhaps the very worst can be avoided then, if we continue to work to reduce global temperatures right through this century and next. Although heartening to some degree, these projections are subject to substantial uncertainty and there is more work to do. In this regard, the authors are at pains to note that their results are not necessarily specific predictions but rather provide insight into possible pathways.

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Although treating food as medicine is a highly debated concept, many recent studies have demonstrated the wisdom in this statement and how monitoring food quantityTrusted Source, type, and timing are crucial for good health. However, what precisely makes up the optimal diet remains controversial. Growing evidence suggests optimal diets may depend on an interplay of health factors, including age, sex, and genetics. Recently, researchers reviewed hundreds of nutrition studies from cellular to epidemiological perspectives to identify a “common denominator nutrition pattern” for healthy longevity. They found that diets including mid-to-high levels of unrefined carbohydrates, a low but sufficient plant-based protein intake, and regular fish consumption were linked to an extended lifespan and healthspan.

Dr. Valter Longo, professor of gerontology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California, and one of the authors of the study, told Medical News Today: “First, diet here is intended as a nutritional lifestyle and not as a ‘weight-loss strategy’ although maintaining a healthy weight is key. All aspects of the diet are linked to long-term health and longevity.”

“I am delighted to see this review,” Dr. Pankaj Kapah, professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study, told MNT. “Generally when one thinks of a longevity diet, the first thing that comes to mind is what we can add to our diet to live longer. This article is important to raise the awareness that the most striking benefits from studies across species have come from limiting the diet or fasting.”

The review was published in the journal CellTrusted Source. The foundation of the longevity diet For the study, the researchers analyzed hundreds of studies examining nutrition and delayed aging in short-lived species, nutrient response pathways, caloric restriction, fasting, and diets with various macronutrient and composition levels, such as the keto diet.

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People who eat red meat just twice a week have a higher chance of developing Type 2 diabetes later in life, and the risk is even larger with greater consumption, a new study found.

Researchers from Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health reached this conclusion by studying the eating habits of more than 216,000 people enrolled in health studies that spanned three decades, according to the study published Thursday in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Every two to four years, these participants answered detailed questions about their diets, and by the end of the study, more than 22,000 developed Type 2 diabetes.

Participants who ate the most red meat had a 62% higher risk of developing the disease compared to those who ate the least.

This included both processed meats — like sausage, bacon and hot dogs — and unprocessed meats — like hamburgers, beef, pork and lamb.

Eating an additional serving of processed or unprocessed red meat had a 46% or 24% higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, respectively. 

Additionally, the researchers found substituting just one of these daily red meat servings for another protein source, like a serving of nuts and legumes, was associated with a 30% lower risk, and substituting for a serving of dairy had a 22% lower risk.

And although it didn't definitively link eating red meat to causing Type 2 diabetes, the study built upon evidence from previous studies strongly associating the two by adding details about how red meat consumption affects a person over time.

"Given our findings and previous work by others, a limit of about one serving per week of red meat would be reasonable for people wishing to optimize their health and well-being," said senior author Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition.

This optimizing of health is vital as rates of Type 2 diabetes are rising globally,  with 90% to 95% of the 37 million Americans with the disease having Type 2. And although it was once an issue for adults over 45, more children and teens are getting the diagnosis due to rising obesity rates.

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Sunday, 22 October

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 2:49 a.m. - 6:47 a.m. UTC
• Where: Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral, Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will be launching 23 Starlink mini satellites into a low Earth orbit to bolster the Starlink constellation and beam internet back down to customers on Earth. The satellites are designated Starlink Group 6-24 and will appear on apps like ISS Detector if you want to try spotting them when they are in orbit.

Monday, 23 October

• Who: CNSA
• What: Long March 2D
• When: 8:03 p.m. UTC
• Where: Xichang Satellite Launch Centre
• Why: China will launch three Yaogan 39 satellites on a Long March 2D rocket. These satellites are remote sensing satellites that will be used for scientific experiments, land and resource surveys, agricultural production estimates, and disaster prevention and mitigation.

Thursday, 26 October

• Who: CNSA
• What: Long March 2F/G
• When: 3:13 a.m. UTC
• Where: LC-43/91 Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre
• Why: The Long March rocket will launch the Shenzhou 17 spacecraft carrying a crew to the Tiangong Space Station. It marks China’s twelfth crewed space mission. It’s not clear who the crew is going to be on this mission but they will be greeted by Jing Haipeng, Gui Haichao, and Zhu Yangzhu when they arrive.

Saturday, 28 October

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• When: 9:07 p.m. UTC
• Where: Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral, Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch two O3b mPOWER broadband internet satellites into a medium Earth orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket for the Luxembourgish company SES. The satellites were built by Boeing and will help to provide internet services over the world.

Recap

• The first launch last week was a Long March 2D carrying the Yunhai 1 04 satellite. This satellite will observe atmospheric, marine, and space environments and provide disaster prevention and mitigation services.

• Next up, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying more Starlink satellites. The first stage of the rocket also landed so that it can be reused.

• Finally, India used a test vehicle to launch its Gaganyaan Crew Module where it performed an in-flight abort demonstration of the Crew Escape System.

That’s all for this week, check back next time.

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Everyone’s into asteroids these days. Space agencies in Japan and the United States recently sent spacecraft to investigate, nudge, or bring back samples from these hurtling space rocks, and after a rocky start, the space mining industry is once again on the ascent. Companies like AstroForge, Trans Astronautica Corporation, and Karman+ are preparing to test their tech in space before venturing toward asteroids themselves.

It’s getting serious enough that economists published a series of papers on October 16 considering the growth of economic activity in space. For instance, a studyby Ian Lange of the colourado School of Mines considers the potential—and challenges—for a fledgling industry that might reach a significant scale in the next several decades, driven by the demand for critical metals used in electronics, solar and wind power, and electric car components, particularly batteries. While other companies are exploring the controversial idea of scooping cobalt, nickel, and platinum from the seafloor, some asteroids could harbor the same minerals in abundance—and have no wildlife that could be harmed during their extraction.

Lange’s study, coauthored with a researcher at the International Monetary Fund, models the growth of space mining relative to Earth mining, depending on trends in the clean energy transition, mineral prices, space launch prices, and how much capital investment and R&D grow. They find that in 30 to 40 years, the production of some metals from space could overtake their production on Earth. By their assessment, metallic asteroids contain more than a thousand times as much nickel as the Earth’s crust, in terms of grams per metric ton. Asteroids also have significant concentrations of cobalt, iron, platinum, and other metals. And thanks to reusable rockets developed by SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and other companies, since 2005 launch costs for payloads have plummeted by a factor of 20 or so per kilogram—and they could drop further.

One day, robots may mine minerals to be used in space, such as for building spacecraft or habitats for astronauts. But current refining methods, which extract useful metals from dirt, depend on fundamentals like gravity, Lange says. It might be better to try to find a way to bring those resources down to Earth, he says—where there would also be plenty of demand for them.

While no one has ever tried to put a price on an asteroid, critical metals get reappraised by markets every day. Cobalt currently goes for about $33,000 per ton, and nickel for $20,000 per ton. Electric vehicles and their batteries need about six times the minerals conventional cars do, and they require both nickel and cobalt in significant quantities. Nickel's also necessary for solar panels, and cobalt’s needed for wind turbines. Demand for cobalt could rise sixfold by 2050, eventually reaching a million tons per year, while demand for nickel could increase fourfold, according to the International Energy Agency, depending on how seriously governments and industries try to achieve a clean energy transition. Demand for platinum-group metals is expected to grow as well, both for catalytic converters and fuel cells.

Lange’s study also highlights the social and environmental costs of mining on Earth. The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for 70 percent of cobalt production, for example, while nickel primarily comes from Indonesia and the Philippines, and Russia and South Africa have most of the global supply of platinum-group metals. Many mining sites in these nations have been reported for systemic use of child labor, forced labor, and human rights abuses, especially for the cobalt supply chain, according to the International Energy Agency. Indonesian nickel mining operations have also been blamed for cutting down forests and polluting water supplies.

While deep-sea mining could present the next frontier in mining these metals on Earth, that entails environmental risks like the disruption of aquatic life, noise and light pollution, and harm to ecosystems. Even the most barren patch of the ocean floor is teeming with life in comparison to asteroids, which—as far as scientists know—are lifeless rocks. Lange argues that mining asteroids will be a more acceptable trade-off to the public: “This [space] rock won’t look like it has looked for the last X million or billion years,” he says, but few people will care if no wildlife are at stake.

Space mining will have its own environmental issues, and currently there is no legal framework to regulate it. Space ethicists want to make sure companies don’t pulverize asteroids as they mine them, or take resources without leaving plenty for others and for future generations. The closest thing so far is the US-led Artemis Accords, a set of rules being crafted for lunar exploration. The moon doesn’t have much in the way of minerals, but it is likely that space agencies and private entities will compete to mine water ice at its poles. While the Outer Space Treaty states that no one can claim territory in space, the accords will allow them to set up “safety zones” around lunar activities.

Still, many technological and economic hurdles have to be crossed before mining begins anywhere. “What kind of manufacturing or refining activity is happening in space right now? Zero. You don’t go from zero to the state of the current economy quickly. You’ve got to crawl and walk first,” Lange says.

These studies attempt to answer questions about the role that space exploration—and related technologies like GPS and satellite imagery—will play in the growth of modern economies, and the potential for government-industry partnerships. Such questions remain “under-scrutinized,” says Luisa Corrado, an economist at Tor Vergata University of Rome, who organized the project. In her own study, she argues that economic and technological spillovers—when space activities stimulate advances on Earth—were more significant during the heyday of the Apollo program and the Cold War’s space race than they are now. But that could soon change. “In my view, we will gradually shift from a ‘space-for-Earth’ to a ‘space-for-space’ economy, providing more opportunities for the production of goods and services in space,” including mining for precious metals, she says.

Even if there’s potential, for now, space mining remains economically risky, and its future depends on increasing demand for certain minerals. In the 2010s, the companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries boldly claimed they’d be visiting and mining asteroids by the 2020s. Planetary Resources was backed by Google cofounder Larry Page and famously included filmmaker James Cameron on its board, as well as Dante Lauretta, the head of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Both companies received lots of hype (including from yours truly and this publication). But in late 2018 and early 2019, both quietly disappeared after being acquired by other companies and ceasing to exist as mining operations.

And before anyone can drill in space, the industry needs much more information about potential asteroid targets, including their abundances of minerals, how hard it would be to wrest them from the rocks, and the obstacles involved in bringing ore back to Earth. It’s hard to get this information; you can’t send a prospecting team to asteroids to take high-resolution photos or dig up core samples. While companies can use data collected by Earth-based telescopes, the next step will be sending spacecraft to examine them in detail.

AstroForge and its competitors may eventually succeed where their predecessors failed. The Los Angeles-based company plans to focus on metallic, M-type asteroids, which are lucrative ore sources for platinum-group metals, says CEO Matt Gialich. Meteorites—which are usually broken bits of asteroids—fall to Earth all the time, offering a glimpse of the makeup of asteroids in space. The concentration of platinum-group metals in iron meteorites ranges between 6 and 230 parts per million, higher than terrestrial ores, according to a recent studyGialich coauthored with a colleague of Lange’s at the colourado School of Mines. Their plan is to bring refined material from such an asteroid back to Earth by the end of the decade.

AstroForge's business model is designed around current technologies and market demand for these metals, not future ones, Gialich says: “We don’t need the market to grow at all. The space economy is already here.”

The company launched a 6U CubeSat into Earth orbit earlier this year, which they’re using to assess how their extraction and refining tech work in microgravity. They’re testing it on a hunk of metallic rock similar to what would be found on an asteroid. AstroForge also has a major test coming in early 2024, when they plan to deploy a spacecraft to closely observe a target asteroid—Gialich won’t name which one, but says it’s a metallic near-Earth object. If all goes as planned, the craft will measure the asteroid’s composition, preparing for a future mission to retrieve material from it. Engineers recently conducted a successful hot fire test of that mission’s flight propulsion system, the company announced on October 18.

Rather than hunting for limited precious metals, Karman+, a Denver-based company that incorporated last year, plans to collect the kind of regolith that can be found on most asteroids. For example, the Japanese space agency’s sample of the asteroid Ryugu showed that it contains hydrated phyllosilicates, a kind of clay that’s thought to be common. Daynan Crull, a Karman+ cofounder, says that large quantities of such raw material from similar asteroids could be used for manufacturing in space—to build things like satellite-servicing infrastructure and space-based solar power. “We’re talking about bringing about the age of regolith. Water and clay don’t grab the headlines like platinum does, but we truly believe this is a new frontier,” he says.

A third company, LA-based TransAstra, is developing asteroid mining technologies with support from NASA grants for far-out projects. It’s also working on spacecraft that could position satellites in Earth orbit or remove orbiting space junk. TransAstra representatives did not respond to WIRED’s request for an interview.

Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard Business School economist and author of one of the new studies, has a positive outlook for the space economy. He believes industries using Earth-observing satellites, and satellite internet companies like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper, are the least risky bets in the near term. The potential scale of space mining, manufacturing, and other new industries remains to be seen, he says, but massive government investment, on the scale of the Apollo era, would lead to more private sector investment, which could really affect the macroeconomy. “There’s a lot of optimism in some quarters,” Weinzierl says.

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Two Vega payloads fail to deploy. A pair of payloads that were among a dozen carried to orbit aboard the Arianespace-managed Vega VV23 flight failed to be deployed and likely burned up in the atmosphere still attached to the rocket’s upper stage, European Spaceflight reports. The Vega VV23 flight launched on October 9 from French Guiana. The rocket carried the THEOS-2 and FORMOSAT-7R/TRITON satellites as its primary payloads and 10 smaller satellites as secondary payloads.

 

Two CubeSats came home sooner than expected ... Following a successful launch, Arianespace published a press release confirming that the two primary payloads and eight of the 10 secondary payloads had been deployed. However, the launch services provider added that “the separation of the last 2 cubesats is still to be confirmed.” Later, Arianespace confirmed that the ESTCube-2 and ANSER-Leader CubeSats likely failed to separate from their respective deployers. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Astra is having stock troubles. Astra's stock dropped another 19 percent on Wednesday, to 75 cents a share, as it continues its downhill march, Payload reports. The launch startup executed a stock split a month ago in an effort to elevate its share price above $1 and keep its place on the NYSE. But share prices have again plummeted, dropping 70 percent, back to below a dollar.

 

Seeking to cut expenses ... The launch startup’s market cap now sits at just $14 million—a far cry from the $2.1 billion valuation the company garnered when it went public during 2021’s SPAC-apalooza. The company reported $36.7 million of cash flow burn in Q2 alone, leaving it with just $26.3 million in the bank. In an attempt to keep the lights on, the company slashed general and administrative expenses in half and redoubled focus on spacecraft thruster production.

 

 

Ariane 6 hot-fire test delayed again. ArianeGroup and Arianespace delayed a critical hot-fire test of the Ariane 6 rocket from early October until sometime in November, the European Space Agency said Thursday. This test will culminate with a full eight-minute firing of the Vulcain 2.1 engine, representing the entire flight phase of the core stage. This test was delayed after an issue with the thrust vector control system of the main engine was discovered earlier this fall.

 

Time needed for analysis ... Thrust vector control is how the engine is gimbaled and the direction of the rocket's thrust adjusted. "A group of experts has been tasked to analyze and propose solutions to resolve the anomaly, characterized by an abnormal internal pressure of the hydraulic group," the space agency stated. Officials with the space agency have said that a launch date estimate will be provided after this full-duration test firing occurs and the results analyzed. However, the agency said Ariane 6 remains "on track" for a debut launch in 2024. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

 

Historic launch pad will be turned into a museum. Because it lacks the funding to modernize its most historic launch pad, Russia now instead plans to turn "Gagarin's Start" into a museum, Ars reports. The pad is known as Gagarin's Start because it hosted the world's first human spaceflight in 1961, when the Vostok 1 mission carrying Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit. Between 1961 and 2019, this workhorse pad accommodated a remarkable 520 launches, more than any other site in the world.

 

You belong in a museum ... The pad was supposed to have been modernized to accommodate the slightly larger Soyuz 2 rocket. However, as things so often have happened in Russia's space program, this modernization work has been put on hold due to a lack of funding. Roscosmos said Kazakh officials will lead the project to create the museum, as the site is the state property of Kazakhstan. It is hoped by Kazakh officials that the addition of the museum will increase the viability of Baikonur as a tourism site.

 

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Despite running into obstacles in the US, Amazon is planning to expand its Prime Air drone delivery program to two additional countries. Amazon announced today that it will soon make drone delivery available for Prime members in Italy and the United Kingdom — in addition to expanding to one more yet-to-be-named US city. The new Prime Air locations will be announced in the coming months, with an anticipated launch date of late 2024.

 

The e-commerce giant stated that it is working with regulators and governments around the world to expand drone delivery.

 

“Not only will this help boost the economy, offering consumers even more choice while helping keep the environment clean with zero emission technology, but it will also build our understanding how to best use the new technology safely and securely,” said UK’s Aviation Minister Baroness Vere in a statement in Amazon’s announcement. 

 

Amazon first promised 30-minute drone deliveries for Prime members way back in 2013, and the program has encountered nothing but hurdles. The company at present only offers Prime Air delivery in two locations: College Station, Texas, and Lockeford, California. Currently, Amazon’s drones are unable to deliver during rainstorms, strong winds, extreme heat, or any unfavorable weather — and only operate from 8AM to 3:30PM every day. Current FAA restrictions also keep Prime Air from flying its drones over people or roads, which leads to Amazon’s next challenge. In order to gain approval from the FAA for a broader rollout in the US, Prime Air must dock hundreds of hours of incident-free flights. But, given the fact that Prime Air currently operates in limited circumstances, it has had trouble meeting the agency’s requirements. Back in May of this year, Prime Air had only made 100 deliveries, reported CNBC.

 

But it’s made some progress since then. Prime Air has signed up “thousands of customers” and delivered “thousands” of packages so far, wrote Amazon spokesperson Zoë Hoffmann in an e-mail to The Verge.

 

Another step by Amazon today suggests it’s ready to make drones a more serious part of its actual delivery network. The company said it plans to add Prime Air delivery to its existing fulfillment network — specifically by adding delivery drones to some of its same-delivery sites. Prime Air drones currently only operate out of the two standalone sites in Texas and California, so expanding drones to other sites means a wider delivery range and closer integration with Amazon’s delivery network.

 

“Moving forward, we will integrate drones into the Amazon delivery network, so customers will have traditional delivery vans, Flex delivery vehicles, and Prime Air drones leaving from the same building,” wrote the company in its announcement. 

 

Amazon also gave us a sneak peek of its new Prime Air delivery drone that it claims flies twice as far as its current model. Even more critically, the drones will be able to operate in light rain and what Amazon calls more “diverse weather.” The company released photos of the MK30 drone today, which it said will replace its existing delivery drones by late 2024.

 

Amazon releases photos of its new Prime Air MK30 delivery drone.

Image: Amazon

 

The MK30 is also smaller and quieter than the existing Prime Air model, Amazon claims. The new drone can deliver objects of up to five pounds, with a typical delivery time of “one hour or less.” The new drone includes a “sense and avoid” feature that can help it avoid pets, people, and property. The new design will hopefully result in smoother flights. As CNBC reported, Prime Air drones have had multiple crashes over the years.

 

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On the busy streets of suburban Berlin, just south of Tempelhofer Feld, a white Kia is skillfully navigating double-parked cars, roadworks, cyclists, and pedestrians. Dan, the driver, strikes up a conversation with his passengers, remarking on the changing traffic lights and the sound of an ambulance screaming past in the other direction. But Dan isn’t in the car.

Instead, he’s half a mile away at the offices of German startup Vay. The company kits its cars out with radar, GPS, ultrasound, and an array of other sensors to allow drivers like Dan to control the vehicles remotely from a purpose-built station equipped with a driver’s seat, steering wheel, pedals, and three monitors providing visibility in front of the car and to its side.

Vay’s approach, which it calls teledriving, is pitched as an alternative to fully autonomous driving, which is proving much harder to achieve than first thought—as the likes of Waymo, Cruise, and Tesla are discovering. Vay was cofounded by Fabrizio Scelsi, Bogdan Djukic, and Thomas von der Ohe, whose personal epiphany came while working at Zoox, one of the world’s leaders in robotaxi development.

At Zoox, remote driving was used as a failsafe for driverless cars. If a self-driving car came across an unexpected obstacle, teleguidance would allow a human operator to take control of the vehicle remotely and steer it around the obstruction.

But von der Ohe was frustrated by the industry’s slow progress. “Robotaxis, for the past 10 years or so, it always seems like they are three years out,” he says. “We actually still don’t know. So we thought about a different approach—how can we get something to market quicker that has great benefits for the customer and cities?”

Remote human assistance, von der Ohe realized, had many benefits over fully autonomous vehicles. It could prevent cars from getting stuck in tricky situations, and address safety concerns. Plus, it could be ready years, if not decades, sooner. “Why don’t we just drive ourselves?” he says.

Vay, where von der Ohe is now CEO, positions itself as an alternative approach to driverless mobility. While customers drive the vehicles like usual, Vay’s “teledrivers” take control of the vehicles once they have been used, and drive them remotely to their next destination, a Zipcar that delivers itself to your door.

But Vay has grander ambitions: to kill the parking space, and redefine the city. “In Europe and the US, you have cities that are built for cars,” von der Ohe says. “That’s how it used to be. You needed parking spaces, so you built them. I’m very driven by having a sustainable and liveable city that is built around us, and not around parked cars and traffic jams.”

This isn’t von der Ohe’s first attempt at tackling this problem. As an undergrad in 2009, he cofounded PocketTaxi, a carpooling service aimed at reducing traffic and emissions by promoting a more flexible ride-sharing environment. And while Vay’s method may be more high-tech, the goal is ultimately the same: reducing the need for individual car ownership by providing a flexible alternative and freeing up space for people.

Things have come a long way for Vay since it was founded in 2018. (“We actually started with a small toy car,” von der Ohe says). The company now tests its fleet of cars and drivers at Berlin’s abandoned Tegel airport. Earlier this year, Vay opened its first US office in Las Vegas. And in February, one of the company’s cars became the first to drive on a public road in Europe without a person inside it. “This milestone was very big for us,” von der Ohe says. “It showed that, from a regulatory and tech perspective, we’ve made so much progress that we can do that.”

The next goal is to bring Vay to market, so that a customer can click a button, have one of Vay’s electric cars driven to them, and then leave it wherever they are when they’re done, without the need to park. Von der Ohe is confident this will be sooner rather than later. “It will be in limited numbers,” he says. “But it shouldn’t be really in years. It’s more like months.”

Beyond the launch, and even beyond Vay, von der Ohe is excited about the potential that teledriving as a concept has to offer the world in the years to come. Driver shortages at airports, harbors, or in the trucking industry, for example, can be assuaged by having a bank of remote drivers available around the world to fill in the gaps. “[Truck drivers] are away from their family for so long,” he says. “If you are remote driving a truck, you could say: ‘After my hours, I can go back to my family.’ And then another remote driver then takes over and the truck is not stuck at a gas station for however many hours.”

Its wide array of applications is one of the many reasons why von der Ohe thinks that teledriving, as well as making modern cities more people-friendly, could revolutionize how several industries work. “I think remote driving/technology can impact so many parts of our lives, so that in three to five years, people will look back and ask why we were so focused on autonomy.”

This article first appeared in the November/December 2023 edition of WIRED UK.

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A consensus among leading American astronomers is that NASA's next wave of great observatories should take advantage of game-changing lift capabilities offered by giant new rockets like SpaceX's Starship.

 

Launching a follow-on to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Starship, for example, could unshackle the mission from onerous mass and volume constraints, which typically drive up complexity and cost, a panel of three astronomers recently told the National Academies' Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics.

 

"The availability of greater mass and volume capability, at lower cost, enlarges the design space," said Charles Lawrence, the chief scientist for astronomy and physics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We want to take advantage of that.”

 

Lawrence's presentation dealt with the impact of large, new launch vehicles on future astronomy missions. The presentation was given last week alongside Martin Elvis, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Sara Seager, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT. Lawrence, Elvis, and Seager authored a paper earlier this year in the journal Physics Today discussing this topic.

 

It's widely known that the Starship's ability to lift more than 100 metric tons into space, at a fraction of the cost per kilogram of existing rockets, would change how the wider space industry does business. The Starship's 9-meter diameter (8 meters of the diameter would be usable for a payload) is nearly double the width of the payload volume on any existing rocket.

 

But astronomers are starting to get serious in planning for rockets like the Starship, or Blue Origin's New Glenn with a slightly smaller 7-meter payload fairing, to be available to loft the next generation of big space telescopes.

Big telescopes on big launchers

In 2021, the National Academies released a once-in-a-decade review of the top astronomy and astrophysics priorities for the US science community. In this survey, known in shorthand as Astro2020, a distinguished panel of scientists laid out a roadmap for NASA to spend the bulk of the 2020s developing technologies and designs for the next series of "great observatories" that will follow the likes of Hubble, Chandra, James Webb, and the Roman Space Telescope scheduled for launch in 2027.

 

NASA's policy is to follow the science community's recommendations wherever possible. Sometime around the end of the decade, the thinking goes, NASA should be ready to officially kick off development of these new telescopes. First should be a large telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which would be comparable in size to Webb with a primary mirror around 6 meters (20 feet) across and a coronagraph or a starshade to blot out starlight, enabling direct observations of planets around other stars, or exoplanets. This is a capability not available on Webb.

 

The Habitable Worlds Observatory, with sensitivity to light in infrared, visible, and ultraviolet wavelengths, would be tasked with observing Earth-like exoplanets in search of worlds that have the makeup to support life. Later, NASA should launch similarly ambitious far-infrared and X-ray telescopes to study the formation of stars, black holes, and galaxies, scientists recommended in 2021.

 

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You snooze, you lose??

Swedish researchers said Wednesday that might not be the case, after their study even saw some benefits for those struggling with morning drowsiness.

While for many, a reach for the snooze button on the alarm clock is how most days start, researchers at Stockholm University noted that little is still known about the habit, prompting them to conduct two studies, the results of which where published Wednesday.

The first sought to identify who the snoozers actually were via the use of questionnaires collected from 1,732 respondents.

"In the first study we found that in general younger people were the ones snoozing and they were to a high degree night owls," Tina Sundelin, sleep researcher at Stockholm University, told AFP, noting that the initial finding was not too surprising.

Sundelin explained that the most common reason for snoozing was simply "because they felt too tired to get up."

But in some cases respondents said they just enjoying the feeling of staying in bed for a while longer, describing it as a "luxury".

The second study then examined how snoozing actually impacted performance and they had 31 individuals join them at their sleep lab.

They then tested the difference between uninterrupted sleep and getting up immediately or first waking up a half-hour earlier and snoozing before getting up.

"What was interesting is that they got less sleep when snoozing but the difference was on average only six minutes," Sundelin explained, adding that most of them managed to get a lot of sleep during that half hour even though it was disturbed.

The test subjects were then asked to perform a few cognitive tests, such as math and memory tests.

Despite having their sleep interrupted at the tail end, there wasn't much difference in how tired they felt, nor was their performance on the tests negatively affected.

"In some of the tests, they even performed a little better after having snoozed," Sundelin said, adding that "the clearest effect is that it isn't negative."

For Sundelin, the results mean that those who need to snooze a little to ease into the day shouldn't be too worried.

"If you're snoozing and feel like it's helping you, it seems like there isn't much reason to stop doing it, as long you are getting enough sleep before," Sundelin said.

SOURCE:

https://news.yahoo.com/swedish-study-shows-snoozing-morning-144011636.html

The heavy burden of clinical hours and administrative duties has left Japan’s university doctors struggling to devote time to research – and could result in big shortcomings in the field, scholars warn.

Writing in The Lancet, two Keio University researchers emphasise the “seriousness of the situation”, as reflected in recent figures.

Amid an overall decline in Japanese research since the early 2000s, faculty members at universities have “been forced to devote more time to education and social service activities”, write Shotaro Kinoshita and Taishiro Kishimoto.

The authors note the “appalling results” of a 2023 survey covering 81 universities, which found that on average, 50 per cent of professors and almost 65 per cent of assistant professors spent less than five hours per week on research.

With changes this coming April prohibiting physicians from working more than 960 hours of overtime a year, the authors worry that even less time will be given over to undertaking lab work and clinical trials – tasks that ultimately help to advance medicine.

“Although securing research hours for university hospital physicians in Japan has been a problem, there are fears that the situation could further worsen,” the authors write.

Noriko Osumi, a neuroscientist and vice-president for diversity at Tohoku University, agreed that “this has been a very serious problem in Japan”.

She traced the issue back to Tokyo’s restructuring of public universities into “national university corporations” in 2004, a move that reduced their government funding – something the authors also note.

“To deal with decreased budgets, medical doctors in university hospitals need to do more clinical work to earn money for the universities,” she said.

Professor Osumi said that ideally, Japanese physician-researchers would spend roughly 20 hours a week on research – compared with the 40 to 50 hours of a full-time researcher, although she conceded that this might be more research than some clinicians would want to do.

To carve out more time, Japan’s government and universities could bring in more professional nurses, assign some of doctors’ current tasks to other staff and promote digitisation – something that is sorely needed, with much of Japan’s record-keeping still done using paper and faxes.

But some of these changes will require a shift in mindset, Professor Osumi said.

“In Japan, clinical research is not [easily] done by PhD researchers, who have no access to clinical data, which is also the basis of why medical research especially declines in Japan…Unfortunately, in [the] clinical department, graduate students are also medical doctors and they also need to work at hospitals.”

Akira Mori, a scholar at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo, said that while the lack of time for research was a serious concern for the medical field, the problem was widespread, with government support to universities having “notably” decreased in recent years – constraining research while “simultaneously increasing obligations in education and public services”.

“I see no compelling reason to specify this issue as unique to university physicians,” he said, adding that the problem affected disciplines from the sciences to the humanities.

“A significant shift in governmental support is essential to reverse the situation in university research capabilities across all fields.”

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"It's important to be informed, but don't stress yourself out," said Dr. Gary Small, chair of psychiatry at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey.

Ration your exposure to what you see, given the impact graphic news reports can have on mental health, Small advises in a hospital news release.

"We live every day in a denial of the horrors out there in the world," Small said, adding that catastrophic events, such as the massacres and kidnappings in Israel and the Sept. 11 terror attacks, put the very worst of human behavior in front of people's eyes.

He recommends finding a balance between being up to date with news and doing calming activities. These might include watching a light television show, spending time with loved ones or reading an engaging book.

Brutal events like the attacks in Gaza and Israel can also lead to "social contagion," where information and images are amplified and a collective stress emerges, Small said.

To protect yourself, take breaks from social media, especially if you find yourself watching horrific images repeatedly, he advised.

Reports of the violence in the Middle East can also trigger anxiety and depression, both in children and adults, for those reading and viewing reports of what's happening.

Dr. Stacy Doumas, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Jersey Shore University Medical Center, offers some additional guidance for protecting children from disturbing media.

"The situation in Israel and Gaza is tragic," Doumas said. "It's OK to let children know innocent people have been impacted. Parents should help children avoid disturbing news and images, while providing them with age-appropriate information. Let them know that war is complicated and information online is not always accurate. Address their fears so they feel safe and supported."

Parents should listen and make themselves available to talk, child psychiatrists say. They should feel confident initiating the conversations. Don't assume your child doesn't know about it just because they haven't brought it up to you. Here are some other tips for parents:

• Work through your own feelings before talking to your children.

• Consider what's age appropriate when giving children information. Keep in mind each child's particular sensitivity level.

• For preschoolers, limit details of the violence. Elementary age children can handle a few more details. Middle school age children will start to differentiate their own thoughts from those of their parents.

• High schoolers can understand the horrific consequences of war. Ask your teens what they've seen on social media and how they feel about it. Consider watching or reading coverage of the war with your teen to help discuss what's reliable.

• Emphasize the ways people are helping within volunteer organizations, the U.S. government and other governments around the world.

• Monitor children's media exposure.

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Last month was the warmest September on record, setting 2023 firmly on track to be the hottest year in almost 175 years of collecting climate data, according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The scorching month follows the hottest June, July and August in recorded history. 

“Not only was it the warmest September on record, it was far and away the most atypically warm month of any in NOAA’s 174 years of climate keeping,” NOAA chief scientist Sarah Kapnick says in a statement. “To put it another way, September 2023 was warmer than the average July from 2001-2010.”

The average global temperature last month measured 61.6 degrees Fahrenheit—outstripping the previous record set in September 2020 by .83 degrees Fahrenheit. And it measured 2.59 degrees above last century’s average of 59.0 and 3.15 degrees above pre-industrial averages.

Researchers attribute the heat mostly to human-caused climate change and El Niño, a natural weather pattern marked by higher sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean along the equator. While both phenomena were expected, the numbers are surprising even to experts who have been researching climate change for years. 

“Staggering. Unnerving. Mind-boggling. Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” writes Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, in a New York Times opinion piece. “As global temperatures shattered records and reached dangerous new highs over and over the past few months, my climate scientist colleagues and I have just about run out of adjectives to describe what we have seen.”

The effects were felt across the globe. Wildfires raged in Canada, heavy rainfall led to catastrophic flooding in Libya and severe drought in the Amazon rainforest dried up rivers and fueled wildfires. 

Per the new report, September also broke records for low sea ice coverage, mostly because of the Antarctic, which saw its fifth-consecutive month with record-low coverage. Warmer sea surface temperatures also contributed to the 17 named storms that occurred across the world in September, seven of which rose to tropical cyclone strength. Previous research has linked higher ocean temperatures to more intense hurricanes. 

While last month seems extraordinary, researchers say temperatures will continue to rise unless we take swift action to limit our carbon dioxide emissions. Next month, officials across the globe will convene for the COP28 United Nations climate change conference in Dubai to discuss how to reach the goals set out in the Paris Agreement of 2015. During COP21 in France, 196 parties agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celcius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. To meet this goal, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 and decline 43 percent by 2030, per the United Nations. 

"A report like this really screams the urgency for advancing our climate actions," Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central, who wasn't involved in the new research, tells NPR’s Julia Simon. "We've got some amazing climate solutions that already exist and some great people working on this around the globe. But we just need to do it faster, and we need to do it bigger."

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The new study found that students who were not the majority race at a predominantly white college reported significantly higher rates of depression than their white peers.

At the mostly white university, more than half of the students who self-identified as races other than white reported feelings of mild depression. An additional 17% said they were experiencing moderate to severe depression.

Students at the predominantly white institution all reported similar levels of anxiety, regardless of race, with more than three in every five students saying they experience mild to severe levels of anxiety.

At the historically Black college, students who weren't Black experienced higher rates of anxiety and depression as well.

"Our study adds to the evidence of how important the work around inclusivity and mental health is in the college environment," said Janani Rajbhandari-Thapa, an associate professor in UGA's College of Public Health. "It's important to be mindful that not all students come with the same background, and we need to support them more."

First-generation students more likely to suffer depression

More than 3,100 students participated in the study during the COVID-19 pandemic, answering questions about feelings of hopelessness, sleep issues and lack of energy, among other topics.

The researchers found that first-generation students were also significantly more likely to experience depression compared to students who weren't the first to attend college in their families.

All first-generation students surveyed expressed that they had some level of depression, regardless of the institution. Most reported mild symptoms, but more than half at the predominantly white university said they had moderate to severe levels of depression.

"I was an international student myself and can relate to the stresses of settling in during the first semester in the U.S. a little bit," Rajbhandari-Thapa said. "Being a first-generation student and experiencing college for the first time in your family comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities, and it is important that university faculty and staff work towards addressing the challenges."

"There are trainings and workshops in the workplace, but we need to do more to help new college students feel at home."

Socializing, sense of belonging helps safeguard against mental illness

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted daily life for most Americans. College students were particularly hard hit.

Where they would normally be socializing and engaging in group activities, many were masked up and socially distanced, preventing some of that integral interaction that strengthens social bonds. The additional stressors likely led to increases in stress and anxiety, but the researchers suggest that not all groups were affected equally.

Female students, for example, were harder hit with depression and anxiety than their male counterparts, which reflects the larger social pattern of mental health problems hitting women more intensely.

But the researchers say investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion resources can help students feel more at home on campus, regardless of their race or first-generation status.

"Belonging is so important," Rajbhandari-Thapa said. "I don't think there is ever enough support for first-generation and minority students. Universities are starting to do this already, but it's important that we provide as much support as possible."

The research is published in the Journal of American College Health.

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A subset of taxpayers will be able to kick Intuit and its ilk to the curb and instead file their 2023 federal taxes online at no charge via a new Direct File option the Internal Revenue Service announced Tuesday.

This step by the IRS, following decades of successful lobbying by tax-prep vendors to stop the government from competing with them online, happened after Congress told the agency to change course. Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act not only provided numerous tax credits for energy-efficiency expenditures but also directed the IRS to study offering direct online filing.

The IRS is starting small, limiting Direct File to taxpayers in Arizona, California, Massachusetts, and New York (its statement says their tax departments “decided to work with the IRS to integrate their state taxes into the Direct File pilot”). Although people in zero-income-tax Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming may also be able to try it out. 

The Washington Post reported that the IRS will send invitations to selected, eligible taxpayers “around mid-February,” citing an IRS briefing. Later on, “more and more eligible taxpayers will be able to access the service to file their 2023 tax returns," it says.

This 1.0 version of Direct File—which the IRS describes as ”a mobile-friendly, interview-based service” that will be available in English and Spanish—will also only cover simpler tax situations. 

The IRS announcement says it expects this app to include W-2 wage income, interest income of $1,500 at most, unemployment compensation, and Social Security and railroad retirement income—meaning gig workers and other Schedule C types, myself included, will have to sit this one out.

Direct File’s support for credits and deductions will stick to the basics, too: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, credits for other deductions, the standard deduction, and deductions for student-loan interest and educator expenses.

Direct File, however, won’t come with an income limit like the IRS’s Free File program, which lets people use commercial tax-prep software at no cost if their adjusted gross income doesn’t exceed $73,000. That program came out of a bargain pushed by Intuit and other tax-prep vendors: Leave online filing to the private sector, and we’ll offer apps such as TurboTax for free to lower-income taxpayers.

But almost nobody uses Free File: The latest edition of the IRS Data Book (PDF) shows that 3.3 million of 160.6 million individual tax-year-2022 returns, or just over 2%, came via that route. In 2019, ProPublica uncovered one possible reason for such low uptake: Intuit had altered pages on its site to cloak Free File references from search engines. The company later agreed to pay a $141 million settlement and left the Free File project in 2021.

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If a snakebitten patient stumbled into an Egyptian physician’s office some 2500 years ago, the doctor might have reached for a papyrus scroll describing 34 snakes and their bites in hieratic script used by ancient Egyptians, with advice on how to treat them. This ancient manual is considered one of the world’s first medical texts.

Since the scroll was first translated 60 years ago, researchers have fiercely debated the identities of the serpents it describes. Now, researchers have used an ecological technique called niche modeling to confidently name 10 of these snakes. Today, Egyptian doctors wouldn’t find the scroll very useful: Of the species pinpointed, none still live within Egypt’s modern borders, the team reported earlier this month in Environmental Archaeology. Even so, experts say the tome offers a glimpse into human-animal interactions of the distant past.

“It’s sort of mind-blowing” that ecological modeling could help answer questions about the health of ancient people, says Gerardo Martin, a disease ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mérida, who was not involved in the work. “It’s a very creative use of ecological knowledge.”

Egyptologists think the snakebite manual was penned by the priests of Serket, the ancient Egyptian goddess of scorpions and other venomous creatures, as well as rebirth. Her priests were considered magicians or doctors because of their healing skills. In the late 1800s, Charles Edwin Wilbour, a U.S. journalist and anthropologist purchased the scroll—it’s unclear from whom—and his heirs donated it to the Brooklyn Museum, where it is housed today. It is the only known version of this document. Researchers have dated the scroll to the 6th century B.C.E., but it’s believed to be a copy of a much older text. Several modern researchers have tried to ascertain the listed species based on the priests’ descriptions, but have come up with conflicting answers.

To learn more, anthropologist Isabelle Winder and venom ecologist Wolfgang Wüster, both at Bangor University, asked their graduate student, Elysha McBride, to try an approach traditionally used to predict a species’ probable habitat range. The technique, called niche modeling, considers the environmental conditions where a species now lives, then incorporates climate data from elsewhere to figure out other suitable homes.

Conservationists use the method to figure out where to implement protective measures for endangered species. McBride wound the clock back on the technique, using it to predict where certain snakes likely lived in the past by incorporating ancient climate data.

She first reviewed the list of species proposed by other researchers. Because bites were the handbook’s area of concern, she focused on 10 species that are considered particularly venomous or aggressive. Using publicly available data, she plotted where each species lives now and analyzed 19 climate variables—such as rainfall and average temperature—to give her model a good idea of the species’ preferred habitat. She then added climate data from up to 6000 years ago and asked the model to predict which species could have slithered through ancient Egypt’s savanna and scrublands.

That habitat would have been suitable for nine of the 10 species studied, including the black mamba, puff adder (which today is responsible for the most snake fatalities in Africa), and the Palestine viper, the Bangor team reported on 7 October. The model suggested  the 10th species, the rhombic night adder (Causus rhombeatus), lived just outside Egypt’s ancient borders, but may still have been known to the priests of Serket, McBride says.

“It is surprising to see that there were probably 10 species living in Egypt that are no longer living there,” says Anooshe Kafash, a paleoanthropologist at the Stiftung Neanderthal Museum who was not involved with the work. Beyond helping clarify how ancient Egyptians interacted with snakes, this approach can be useful “in answering mystery questions about how ancient humans have interacted with other plants and animals,” he adds. For example, he is using niche modeling to determine how Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans spread through time.

Martin says it’s a “fascinating” use of the application. Although fossil evidence attested to the presence of some of these snakes, the study provides fresh evidence the others were there, too. “That’s a good thing,” he says. “It opens up many avenues to understanding how some diseases have emerged in the past.” Still, he cautions that it’s not a sure bet that the habitats these species stick to today are the same ones they preferred thousands of years ago. Their preferences may have evolved over time, he suggests, so additional modeling would be needed to make the results “more robust.” 

doi: 10.1126/science.adl4033

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Prior research has shown that one of the factors involved in the obesity epidemic in many Western countries is a preference for fatty foods. In this new effort, the team in the U.K. sought to learn which parts of the brain are involved in such a preference—a finding that might lead to therapies directed at those brain parts to help reduce peoples' response to fatty foods.

One of the reasons people like ice cream is its texture—and its texture is partly due to the amount of fat it contains. Prior research has shown that people respond to both the taste of the ice cream and the rich physical sensations that are felt as the ice cream is eaten, particularly when licked from atop a cone. To find out which parts of the brain are responsible for such reactions, the research team carried out a series of measurements.

The first measurement involved creating several milkshakes with varying levels of fat in them. Next, they used tongues extracted from pigs to measure the degree of friction that occurred when each of the milkshakes was licked.

They then asked 22 human volunteers to sample the same types of milkshakes, while also undergoing an MRI scan of the brain. After each taste, each volunteer was asked to estimate how much they would pay for a full glass of the milkshake as a means of measuring how much each of the volunteers liked the samples they were given.

In studying the brain scans, the researchers found that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) lit up when the volunteers were taste-testing. They also found that the amount it lit up corresponded with the amount a volunteer was willing to pay for a shake after a taste-test. The study concluded by inviting all the volunteers to a free meal—curry dishes were given with different amounts of fat in them. The researchers found that those volunteers whose OFCs lit up the most, tended to eat more of the curry that had the most fat in it.

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Published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, the research examined the effects of circulating B12 concentration on the levels of two key inflammatory markers in both humans and mice.

Vitamin B12, an essential nutrient with roles in various physiological processes, is known to be critical for overall health. Its deficiency can be the result of dietary insufficiency, particularly in vegetarian and vegan populations, or inefficient absorption in the body. This can lead to a range of complications, including neurological disorders. While previous research has hinted at the potential anti-inflammatory properties of vitamin B12, the precise relationship is not fully understood.

Now, a team of researchers in Spain have investigated the effects of vitamin B12 on the levels of two molecules in the body which promote inflammation, specifically interleukin (IL)-6 and C-reactive protein (CRP).

Rosa M. Lamuela-Raventós, co-corresponding author of the study and Professor of Nutrition, Food Sciences and Gastronomy at INSA-University of Barcelona and Inés Domínguez López, a predoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona and co-first author of the study explained the motivations behind the study.

"Since chronic inflammation is associated with a wide range of diseases, understanding how vitamin B12 status influences inflammation could have significant implications for disease prevention and management. IL-6 and CRP are widely recognized as key markers of inflammation in clinical practice, as elevated levels of these markers are associated with various inflammatory conditions and chronic diseases."

"Establishing the relationship between inflammatory markers like IL-6 and CRP [and vitamin B12 levels] could have direct clinical relevance and open doors to novel therapeutic strategies."

The study utilized samples from a randomized subsection of participants in PREDIMED, a large clinical trial based in Spain, designed to assess the effect of the Mediterranean diet on the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease. An assessment of the serum levels of vitamin B12 and the concentrations of the inflammatory markers revealed a correlation between the two.

"Our study found that in general, the more vitamin B12 an individual has, the lower their inflammatory markers are—we call this an inverse relationship," explained Marta Kovatcheva, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and co-first author of the study.

"With regards to vitamin B12 deficiency, we must point out that we did not specifically look at deficient individuals in this study. Nevertheless, our results raise some important questions. We already know that vitamin B12 deficiency can be harmful in many ways, but what we have reported here is a novel relationship. This might help us better understand why some unexplained symptoms of human B12 deficiency, like neurologic defects, occur."

To validate the findings of the research within the general population, Domínguez López noted, "It will be important to expand the cohorts, to look at sex-specific differences (as males and females often have different biology) and also to investigate the specific situations such as B12 deficiency, infection, or aging in humans."

The study also observed the same relationship between vitamin B12 and inflammatory markers in naturally aged mice, offering a valuable avenue of using mouse models to delve deeper into the underlying mechanisms of the inverse correlation. Lamuela-Raventós explained, "This will help us understand the biology of this relationship we've observed, and will help us to ascertain any dietary and/or clinical recommendations that could be made in the future."

Surprisingly, the researchers noted that unlike humans, mice do not become B12 deficient with age. "We didn't know this before, and it poses the possibility that studying mice could potentially help us understand how we could prevent B12 deficiency in older humans," said Kovatcheva.

The team now hopes to explore the link between vitamin B12 and inflammation, within the context of specific high-inflammation conditions, such as infection, obesity, and irritable bowel syndrome. "We already know that vitamin B12 deficiency is not good for an individual, and that dietary measures should be taken to correct it. It will be interesting to understand if vitamin B12 supplementation can play a role in disease management," noted Lamuela-Raventós.

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There’s much, much more to the rainforest than meets the eye. Even a highly trained observer can struggle to pick out individual animals in the tangle of plant life—animals that are often specifically adapted to hide from their enemies. Listen to the music of the forest, though, and you can get a decent idea of the species by their chirps, croaks, and grunts.

This is why scientists are increasingly bugging rainforests with microphones—a burgeoning field known as bioacoustics—and using AI to automatically parse sounds to identify species. Writing today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers describe a proof-of-concept project in the lowland Chocó region of Ecuador that shows the potential power of bioacoustics in conserving forests. 

“Biodiversity monitoring has always been an expensive and difficult endeavor,” says entomologist and ecologist David Donoso of Ecuador’s National Polytechnic School, a coauthor of the paper. “The problem only worsens when you consider that good monitoring programs require many years of data to fully understand the dynamics of the system, and how specific problems affect these dynamics.”

The researchers picked over 40 sites across different landscape types, including active agricultural lands, plantations that had been abandoned for decades (and are recovering ecologically), and intact, old-growth forest. Below, you can see the instruments they deployed. At left is a microphone that recorded sound for two minutes every 15 minutes, so it didn’t drain its battery as quickly as recording 24/7. At right is a light trap for catching insects. 

Sound recorder and automatic light trap for recording voices and night insects.

Photograph: Annika Busse

Once the team had these recordings, they tapped experts to identify birds and amphibians by their vocalizations, and used DNA from the light traps to identify nocturnal insects. They also used AI to identify the bird species by sound.

“We can say the scientific part is basically solved, so the AI models work,” says conservation ecologist Jörg Müller of the University of Würzburg in Germany, lead author of the paper. “It’s fine-scale, high-quality. And the nice thing is that you can store the data.” Several years of recordings will track how the forest ecosystem evolves over time, with species populations waxing or waning as new arrivals colonize the terrain, or as climate change affects which struggle or thrive in hotter, drier conditions.

In particular, scientists and conservationists are interested in learning about the composition of species that return to disturbed environments. In Ecuador, the agricultural land tends to attract birds from southern parts of South America with their natural open areas, which are similar to the Pampas grasslands. “So it could be that you have the same number of species in agriculture and all those forests, but totally different ones,” says Müller. “These habitats are not empty—they are full of birds—but not the original fauna from primeval forests.”

This map shows the many sampling locations in Ecuador.

Illustration: Constance Tremlett

Researchers are also trying to track animals that are responding to a complex set of overlapping environmental stressors. Forest health used to primarily be a problem of deforestation. Now it is a far more complicated set of problems stemming from global climate change and land use. The Amazon, for instance, is threatened by both loggers and severe droughts. 

One of the challenges of field observation is that it requires humans, who are very big mammals, to go traipsing through the forest, altering its normal bustle. But a microphone simply listens, a camera trap quietly watches for movement and snaps a picture, and a light trap silently attracts insects.

The study’s recordings picked up the purple-chested hummingbird, shown at top, and the extremely rare banded ground cuckoo, shown below. “This is the holy grail for ornithologists. Some ornithologists go to Ecuador for 30 years to see the bird and never see them,” says Müller. “And we report it with sound recorders and with camera traps. So it shows another advantage from these recorders: They do not disturb.”

The Banded Ground Cocoo (Neomorphus radiolosus, left) is among the birds recorded in tropical reforestation plots in Ecuador.

Photograph: John Rogers

Bioacoustics can’t fully replace ecology fieldwork, but can provide reams of data that would be extremely expensive to collect by merely sending scientists to remote areas for long stretches of time. With bioacoustic instruments, researchers must return to collect the data and swap batteries, but otherwise the technology can work uninterrupted for years. “Scaling sampling from 10, 100, [or] 1,000 sound recorders is much easier than training 10, 100, 1,000 people to go to a forest at the same time,” says Donoso.

“The need for this kind of rigorous assessment is enormous. It will never be cost-effective to have a kind of boots-on-the-ground approach,” agrees Eddie Game, the Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist and director of conservation for the Asia Pacific region, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “Even in relatively well-studied places it would be difficult, but certainly, in a tropical forest environment where that diversity of species is so extraordinary, it’s really difficult.” 

A limitation, of course, is that while birds, insects, and frogs make a whole lot of noise, many species do not vocalize. A microphone would struggle to pick up the presence of a butterfly or a snake.

But no one’s suggesting that bioacoustics alone can quantify the biodiversity of a forest. As with the current experiment, bioacoustics work will be combined with the use of cameras, field researchers, and DNA collection. While this team harvested DNA directly from insects caught in light traps, others may collect environmental DNA, or eDNA, that animals leave behind in soil, air, and water. In June, for instance, a separate team showed how they used the filters at air quality stations to identify DNA that had been carried by the wind. In the future, ecologists might be able to sample forest soils to get an idea of what animals moved through the area. But while bioacoustics can continuously monitor for species, and eDNA can record clues about which ones crossed certain turf, only an ecologist can observe how those species might be interacting—who’s hunting who, for instance, or what kind of bird might be outcompeting another. 

The bioacoustics data from the new study suggests that Ecuador’s forests can recover beautifully after small-scale pastures and cacao plantations are abandoned. For instance, the researchers found the banded ground cuckoo already in 30-year-old recovery forests. “Even our professional collaborators were surprised at how well the recovery forests were colonized by so-called old-growth species,” says Müller. “In comparison to Europe, they do it very quickly. So after, let's say, 40, 50 years, it's not fully an old-growth forest. But most of these very rare species can make use of this as a habitat, and thereby expand their population.”

This technology will also be helpful for monitoring forest recovery—to confirm, for example, that governments are actually restoring the areas they say they are. Satellite images can show that new trees have been planted, but they’re not proof of a healthy ecosystem or of biodiversity. “I think any ecologist would tell you that trees don't make a forest ecosystem,” says Game. The cacophony of birds and insects and frogs—a thriving, complex mix of rainforest species—do. 

“I think we're just going to keep on learning so much more about what sound can tell us about the environment,” says Game, who compares bioacoustics to NASA’s Landsat program, which opened up satellite imagery to the scientific community and led to key research on climate change and wildfire damage. “It was radically transformational in the way we looked at the Earth. Sound has some similar potential to that,” he says.

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This month, the Cambodian government reported that two people there died of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or H5N1 bird flu, after being exposed to infected poultry. For people, the risk of getting infected is low, but outbreaks in animals have been rising worldwide, wiping out chicken flocks and wild bird populations. The virus is devastating to poultry producers, who are forced to slaughter infected flocks.

A growing number of countries are starting to vaccinate chickens against bird flu, while the United States and United Kingdom are still holding out because of uncertainties about immunization’s cost and effectiveness. Meanwhile, researchers in the UK have come up with another possible approach to protecting poultry flocks: gene editing. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, and the Pirbright Institute used the gene-editing tool Crispr to make the first chickens that are partially resistant to the virus. They published their results last week in the journal Nature Communications.

Like tiny molecular scissors, Crispr allows scientists to make targeted cuts to an organism’s genetic code. The UK team used the technology to tweak a chicken gene that is responsible for producing the protein ANP32A. During infection, the bird flu virus takes over this protein to help make copies of itself.

“All viruses are obligate parasites,” said Wendy Barclay, a study author and virologist at Imperial College London, during a press briefing on October 5. When viruses get inside a host cell, she said, “they hijack various proteins inside the cell to help themselves replicate.” In 2016, Barclay’s lab discovered that influenza viruses use the ANP32A protein in this way.

The researchers produced 10 chickens with this edited gene and exposed them to the H9N2 strain of bird flu, using a dose size that mimicked what animals would likely experience in the real world. They used this strain, rather than the more deadly H5N1, because it is the one chickens would most likely encounter during an outbreak. Only one of the 10 birds got infected, and the virus didn’t spread to other chickens.

The team then exposed the gene-edited birds to an artificially high dose of the virus. This time, five out of 10 birds became infected, but the gene edit still provided some level of protection. The amount of virus found in the infected animals was much lower than the level typically detected among chickens that are ill with bird flu.

The gene edit also helped limit the spread of the virus. Four ordinary chickens were placed in the same incubator with the gene-edited birds that had already been exposed to high levels of the virus. Out of the four, only one became infected.

Researchers monitored the gene-edited birds over the course of two years and found that the gene changes had no adverse effects on their health or egg production.

“This is showing a potential mechanism for reducing the susceptibility of chickens to avian flu,” says Carol Cardona, a veterinarian and professor of avian health at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine, who wasn’t involved in the study. “But even if we protected every single chicken on the globe, flu wouldn't go anywhere.” Avian influenza has been identified in more than 100 different species of birds.

The fact that some breakthrough infections occurred means that the virus still has a chance to infect other birds, and could “escape” the vaccine’s effects by mutating away from using the ANP32A protein to reproduce. In fact, when the UK researchers took samples of the virus from the infected gene-edited chickens, they found some mutations in the part of the virus that this protein interacts with.“The flu virus replicates rapidly, and every time it enters a new host, there's an opportunity for that virus to adapt and change,” Cardona says.

During the press briefing, Barclay said those viral mutations didn’t make the chickens any sicker. The team also wanted to make sure those changes wouldn’t cause more severe infection in people, so they added the mutated viruses to human airway cells that had been cultivated in a dish. They found that the mutations didn’t help the virus grow in a way that would pose an increased risk to people.

It’s also not known how the gene-edited chickens will fare against the much more aggressive bird flu strains such as H5N1, which weren’t tested in the study. Barclay said they chose H9N2, considered a low pathogenicity virus that causes little to no signs of disease, in part because it’s more common. Also, deliberately infecting chickens with H5N1 raises animal welfare concerns, since it causes serious illness and is often fatal.

The authors identified two other related proteins, ANP32B and ANP32E, that they think would prevent virus replication. In chicken cells grown in the lab, they edited the genes that code for all three proteins and exposed them to the flu virus. The edits successfully blocked growth of the virus in the cells, but the researchers have not yet bred chickens with all three edits.

Susan Lamont, an expert on poultry genetics at Iowa State University, says that making multiple genetic modifications could reduce the possibility that the viruses will escape. “When you start doing that, it really makes it much more difficult for the virus population to find its way around the resistance properties of that animal,” she says.

But Brian Ladman, senior scientist at the University of Delaware Poultry Health System, says removing too many genes could be deleterious to the animals’ health. “These genes are there for a reason,” he says. For broiler chickens, which live only eight to 12 weeks before they are slaughtered, the health effects of gene editing may not have time to manifest during their lives, Ladman says. But laying chickens are kept commercially for two to three years.

While the research is still in very early stages and isn’t ready to be deployed widely, Lamont says she can imagine that future poultry producers may combine vaccination against avian flu with gene editing to boost viral resistance. “This disease is so prevalent and so important that any strategies that we can bring together to help protect the health of the birds is, in my view, very good,” she says.

Poultry producers already combine vaccination plus genetic selection—that is, choosing which chickens to breed based on certain traits—to prevent disease. Decades ago, scientists identified genetic variations that enhance resistance to the virus that causes Marek’s disease, a common and highly contagious illness that produces paralysis and tumors. Chicken producers began breeding birds with this trait while also vaccinating them against the disease. Lamont says this two-pronged approach is more protective than either on its own.

The UK researchers say their gene-edited chickens are a proof of concept that shows a possible way to make chickens resistant to bird flu. “We’re not there yet,” Barclay said. “We would need more edits, more robust edits to really shut down the virus replication.”

And in England at least, it will likely take some time for gene-edited chickens to make it to people’s plates. The government passed a law in March legalizing the commercial development of gene-edited foods, but a second vote is needed to allow farm animals with edited genomes. In the US, the first gene-edited food animal—a cow edited to have a short, slick-hair coat—was approved in 2022. The trait has been found to help cattle tolerate hot weather.

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It’s an age-old paradox—as we get older and have more wisdom and life experiences to share, our minds start playing tricks on us, and we find it more difficult to retrieve the information we want. We find it harder to remember key details about our lives and our loved ones, or mix up basic facts about the world. About one in 10 adults aged 65 and over have dementia, and 22% have some form of mild cognitive impairment.

What causes these kinds of impairments? And more importantly, what can we do about them? As medicine continues to improve physical health and lengthen people’s lifespans, three Tufts University researchers are investigating how we can improve memory and cognition as we age as well.

In disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and nutrition, they are uncovering key insights that could help slow the decline of the brain as we age—and help us better cope with the deteriorations that inevitably occur.

Making Connections with Memories

As an undergrad, Elizabeth Race volunteered with a program called Grandfriends, in which students befriended seniors at assisted living facilities. “I was always struck by how much you can learn from older adults,” says Race, now an associate professor of psychology. “The amount they can contribute to the world is really undervalued.”

In graduate school, Race became fascinated with examining what makes some older adults stay mentally sharp as a tack, while others deteriorate into cognitive impairment and dementia.

At Tufts, her research examines both the physical deterioration in areas of the brain associated with memory storage and retrieval, as well as the connections between these areas. “With new brain imaging technology, we can visualize these networks in a way we couldn’t do 10 or 15 years ago,” she says. Knowing how these connections work, Race says, may help people develop strategies for drawing upon healthy brain regions to compensate for losses in impaired areas.

In her studies of the prefrontal cortex, the “command center” of the brain in charge of executive function, Race has noted that the outside edges, known as the lateral prefrontal cortex, deteriorate faster than the interior region, known as the medial prefrontal cortex. While the former is associated with task switching and short-term memory, the latter is associated with prior knowledge and personal information.

In experiments using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), she’s found that older adults can better remember new information by linking it to something they already know—like memorizing digits by envisioning a telephone keypad or associating new information with a personal hobby, such as types of birds and where they live.

In other experiments using EEG (electroencephalogram) technology, she’s explored the natural oscillations of brain waves. When exposed to music or rhythm in the environment, brain waves become synchronized with that beat. Since the medial prefrontal cortex is also associated with music, she’s found that presenting information rhythmically can also help better encode memories for later retrieval.

“When we are presenting important information,” says Race, “we can ask, are there really simple behavioral interventions we can do that could dramatically improve people’s ability to remember things clearly and vividly?”

How Stereotypes of Aging Affect Memory

When older people come into Ayanna Thomas’ lab for experiments on cognition, they often arrive with an apology. “They say to me or my students, ‘My memory’s terrible—I’m not going to do well,’” says Thomas, a psychology professor and dean of research for Arts and Sciences. “So they are already feeling pressure and anxiety about their cognitive functioning.”

In her research, Thomas investigates how such metacognition—thinking about thinking—affects people’s ability to remember in various contexts.

“The societal representations of what it means to become older are full of negative stereotypes associated with poor memory, and that can really affect the way people feel about themselves,” she says.

In some experiments, for example, she exposes people to a short video clip depicting a crime, and then has them read a narrative about the same incident that includes both correct and incorrect information. Afterwards, she asks them to recall details of the incident, and finds that when told not to worry about whether information is correct or not, they score similarly to younger participants, including both correct and erroneous information.

On the other hand, when told they will be penalized for incorrect information—thus activating their stereotype threat, which is when people are afraid that their actions will confirm negative stereotypes about their group—they tended to perform worse, by withholding correct details. The results have implications for witness testimony in court.

“They may be exercising a form of control by withholding both correct and incorrect information,” Thomas says. She has extrapolated these findings to other situations, such as a visit to a doctor’s office, where older people may feel anxiety over questions about brain function, exhibiting poor memory. They may feel more relaxed and do better, she says, if they are interviewed by an older person who they perceive to be more sympathetic to the challenges of aging.

Recently, Thomas has been collaborating with Race to examine whether giving older people a warning about incorrect information can help them weed out those details and remember more accurately.

In this case, study participants watch a crime video and then listen to a narrative report recounting the event that they are told could not be verified.

The researchers are exploring whether that warning reduces the likelihood that the incorrect information is incorporated into their final reports.

“We know that younger adults benefit from these kinds of warnings, but we’re not quite sure if older adults will be able to benefit as well, since that requires cognitive processes that may be difficult for them,” Thomas says. “However, if warnings prove effective, they could be helpful in dealing with cases of misinformation on the internet, or when they are being questioned by an investigator in a criminal justice situation.”

A Healthy Diet and a Healthy Brain

Incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in the U.S. dramatically increases with age. At age 65, it affects an estimated one out of every 20 adults, while at age 85, it affects one out every three, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. But the processes that lead to Alzheimer’s are believed to start years or even decades before, says Paul Jacques, a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

“It’s now believed that the progression to Alzheimer’s disease starts 20 or 30 years prior to diagnosis of the condition,” he says. “This may be the best window of opportunity to prevent the damage that leads to Alzheimer’s disease.”

As nutritional epidemiology team leader at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutritional Research Center on Aging at Tufts, he’s been looking at long-term data to tease out how diet might increase or decrease risk of the disease.

Much of his research focuses on data from the Framingham Heart Study, a longitudinal study tracking associations between lifestyle, diet, and health outcomes since 1948. Researchers have identified few modifiable risk factors when it comes to Alzheimer’s, Jacques says. In fact, changes in diet and nutrition may be one of the few ways to intervene in the disease.

Among the nutrients he’s found that could lower risk are flavonoids, plant pigments found in many fruits, vegetables, and other plant foods, including blueberries and strawberries, apples, red and purple grapes, and tea. They have been shown to prevent inflammation—one of the essential mechanisms behind Alzheimer’s. He’s also found an association between Alzheimer’s and low choline, an organic compound found in wide variety of foods, including eggs, meat, and leafy vegetables, that is essential for neurotransmitter acetylcholine.

In other research, Jacques and colleagues have shown that the vitamins B12 and folate (B9) may be protective against cognitive decline. However, this work has also suggested that high consumption of folic acid, the synthetic form of folate found in most supplements and fortified foods, is associated with worse cognitive function in older adults with inadequate B12 status. His current research is focused on addressing the role of these B vitamins on brain aging, including risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Taken as a whole, Jacques’ research provides important evidence that diet may affect cognitive decline and risk of Alzheimer’s disease, though determining exactly how diet relates to brain health is an ongoing process.  

For the average person, he says the best protection against cognitive decline is a healthy diet overall. “Focusing on one item, such as eating more berries, is not going to hurt you,” he says. “But the strongest evidence shows that the healthiest diet is one lower in red meat and higher in fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. It will lower your risk for cardiovascular disease—and Alzheimer’s disease as well.”

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